‘The Americans’ Creator: Being in the CIA Made Me Empathize With the KGB
In this bonus episode of The New Abnormal, Joseph Weisberg explains how his time in the CIA made him see the KGB and Russia in a new light. Plus, he reveals what his new show is.
Photo Illustration by The Daily Beast/Getty
Joseph Weisberg’s book Russia Upside Down started with a lecture he never gave. The Americans showrunner worked briefly in the CIA, where his fascination with, and research about, Russia began. However, the lecture would be on counterintelligence, which wasn’t his field of expertise.
Instead of throwing away his Russia notes for the canceled class, he decided to write a book about it. And his stance is clear: Russia is not as bad as we think it is.
“I read this book by a guy who had been a KGB officer and his book was about him and his friends [in the] KGB,” he tells Molly Jong-Fast on this bonus episode of The New Abnormal. “And they sounded exactly like me and my friends from the CIA.”
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“They weren't like evil, cold-blooded killers,” he says. In fact, this worldview change is what prompted the creation of The Americans, too.
“[Russia] was just anything other than a simplistic, evil empire. And essentially once I rethought that, I started seeing modern-day Russia very differently too. And seeing that we were kind of repeating our same habits of, you know, making Putin nothing but a villain and making the Russians only a country that attacks us and we’re its innocent victims,” he explains.
Molly points out that Russia seems to be struggling with a Kremlin crackdown on opposition, and, in a previous TNA interview, Alexei Navalny’s chief-of-staff told her that Russia never had a democracy. But Weisberg says the country is still not doing as badly as we think. His real fear is that the United States will go to a Cold War with Russia—and China–at the same time.
Plus, Weisberg tells Molly about his new show that’s about a serial killer and his therapist, who happens to be Steve Carell.
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